Jeremiah Wright and the Shoe that Didn’t Drop — Again

The final weekend of the 2012 presidential campaign seems like as good a time as any to note that neither the Romney campaign nor its affiliates (unless you count Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, with its stillborn scoop on Obama’s 2007 Hampton University speech, as an affiliate) played the Jeremiah Wright Card.

Recall, back in May, the New York Times report that GOP strategists were kicking around the idea of having billionaire Joe Ricketts underwrite a $10 million advertising campaign linking Obama anew to the controversial Rev. Wright. These strategists, according to the Times, sought to “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do: Show the world how Barack Obama’s opinions of America and the world were formed. And why the influence of that misguided mentor and our president’s formative years among left-wing intellectuals has brought our country to its knees.”

In an interview with TownHall.com’s Guy Benson, Romney personally distanced himself from the proposed effort (over which he would have had no control, at least officially), and compared it to the Bain Capital attack ads aired by an Obama-affiliated SuperPac:

I repudiate the effort by that PAC to promote an ad strategy of the nature they’ve described. I think what we’ve seen so far from the Obama campaign is a campaign of character assassination. I hope that isn’t the course of this campaign. So in regards to that PAC, I repudiate what they’re thinking about.

It may seem trivial at this point. If Romney is elected, the decision not to “go there” will have been borne out: Team Romney wisely spikes unnecessary provocation early in the game. But if he loses, there will no doubt be a segment of the right that will gnash its teeth for the next four years over the fact that Obama was elected — twice! — without having been fully vetted. Ricketts and his ilk believe America would not have elected Obama the first time if McCain had gone the “full Jeremiah.” To decline to do so again — a bitter pill to swallow for them indeed.

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18 Responses to Jeremiah Wright and the Shoe that Didn’t Drop — Again

It seems to make sense, though, that Romney would not want religion to come to heavily into the campaign. After all, there are plenty on the right who question Romney as a Christian due to his Mormonism, and should his campaign, or those aligned with his campaign have gone after Obama’s former pastor, then we would have likely seen a lot more about Romney’s Mormonism, especially in the more evangelical areas of the swing states, which could have worked to undermine his required base.

Win or lose, I think it was probably smart for Romney to avoid making religion and religious affiliation part of the campaign rhetoric.

When the Jeremiah Wright thing first broke in 2008, I spent a few hours watching the full text of his speeches on YouTube. I didn’t find anything I particularly objected to, or couldn’t readily defend. The closest thing was “God damned America.” I am certain this was past tense, not future tense, and it didn’t sound much different than some of Pat Robertson’s ramblings.

Then, when it was all quieting down, partly the result of Obama’s eloquent speech in Philadelphia, Wright elbowed his way back into the limelight, spouting insane nonsense. It was then that I realized Wright felt threatened to the core of his world view by the notion that a member of his church, a man with even slightly darker skin than his own, could actually be elected president, in a nation with an overwhelmingly “white” majority.

Wright burst forth in a kamikaze mission to make sure that didn’t happen. He failed. Most people of African descent I knew thought he should shut up.

If Joe Ricketts had gone ahead, and if he had succeeded, nobody would have been happier, or felt more vindicated, than Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Kudos to Romney for not wanting to start race-baiting, even with as objectionable a figure as Wright. That’s something this country absolutely does not need.
I’m also glad that no one (except, sigh, Andrew Sullivan who deserves to be slapped for it) has played the Mormon card. We also do not need to start screaming at each over matters theological.

Unless there is new and incendiary information about Wright (and Obama) that didn’t surface in the 2008 campaign–and I’m not aware of any–I’m not sure that flogging Wright would have done much good–the issue was discussed thoroughly in 2008. Might as well drag Bill Ayers out of his hole as well.

Unless, of course, you’re of the opinion that Romney failed to engage in sufficient race-baiting.

The notion that we should need to “vet” someone for a job he has been doing for the last four years is nuts. If Obama is a secret liberal Manchurian candidate, he sure has blown his big chances to show it so far. He couldn’t even get cap and trade done!

The most dangerous thing to a polity is when its majority, or plurality, ethnicity is mobilized. So far no major politician — except in a very mild and oblique way Sarah Palin — has had the courage to explicitly appeal to the interests of whites (NB: no scare quotes). It will happen, though.

He hasn’t been vetted? You might learn the difference between “Other people understand but disagree with me” and “They just don’t understand how ignorant they are.”

No one gives a damn about Rev. Wright. Get over it. I notice you are not complaining that there has been no coverage of Mitt’s escape to France and thereby conveniently avoiding a trip to Vietnam. Has Romney been vetted? What if a Democrat had done that?

Since when is it racebaiting to merely spell out plainly what Wright’s racist views actually are? Such are the rewards of plainspeaking in a day of politically correct hypocrites.

Black Liberation Theology denies original sin per se and credits the white man for being the root of all the black man’s problems. Get rid of whitey and the land of milk and honey is right around the corner. Which of course is why Wright was in a snit over his boy smashing the ghetto ceiling into smithereens.

Romney of course doesn’t have a spine. (Neither for that matter does Geo. W. Obama, but what else is new?)

Anybody that is paying attention knows that the fix is in after watching the Al Smith Memorial Dinner. Just like before with McCain, Romney was brilliant, both in substance and delivery. Yet that was the first and the last we heard of it as again with Juan Sydney McMussolini in ’08.

Benghazi, Fast and Furious, Wright’s AA version of the Klan? Down the memory hole. (Never mind to expect that Obamacare will be repealed by those responsible for Romneycare is drug induced dreaming. Something of course, will come up that will prevent Mitt from doing what he really wanted to do OC. Right.)

For the record, a mediocre white fascist is hardly a galvanizing alternative to a mediocre half white fascist in that under either administration the free market will continue to be blamed for whatever mess crony capitalism has given and will continue to give us. Further, any benefits of Romney domestically will at least be matched with expenditures in the military industrial segment for a war with Iran.

But the neo cons can count their blessings in disguise. It might be just as well that a Repug is not in the White House when the economy tanks. Unless you are looking for Hillary to be a shoein for ’16. Would we be able to count on Romney for a tepid campaign to deny her the honor then? I suppose. But what difference would it make?

Perhaps they didn’t use the Wright talking points overtly because they chose instead to send a million DVDs of “Dreams From My Real Father” (poll tested by Frank Luntz) to homes in Ohio and other swing states. If the GOP believes this stuff, they should say so in the light of day. This is not worthy of the party of Lincoln.

Let me say that the GOP brand has been sullied badly with birtherism, Trump, Arpaio, Sununu, and some of the more vocal people of this ilk. People do not like race-baiting in their politics. I am conservative and I am uncomfortable with this line of attack.
If this line of attack were to be used successfully against Obama, then we have the wrong candidate and team to pull it off. Like it or not, conservatives have to realize that Romney is one of the least talented politicians to be on the national stage in more than a century. We need to get our act together because if H. Clinton decides to run in 2016, she will steamroll right into the general come 2016 and we stop looking like a national party if we lose a 3rd consecutive Presidential election.

Do you think Romney would win with an openly racist (or, if you perfer, “race-based” campaign)? That he didn’t go hard enough with memes suggesting that the President has it in for Caucasians, and seeks to exact revenge for two-plus centuries of mistreatment? (Though Romney’s desperate attempt to spin Obama’s remark that “voting is the best revenge”–something Obama has been saying in virtually every stump speech all year–into something more sinister, seems to be a feint in this direction, although not explicit).

Are you suggesting that Romney would do better if he explicitly accused the President of pursuing policies seeking to undermine or disenfranchise white people?

Given that the Pres hasn’t done any such things in his first term, I have a hard time believing this would be a fruitful strategy. And given that a nontrivial number of whites (including myself) would be outraged by such a strategy, particularly in the absence of evidence, my strong suspicion is that this would result in an even bigger electoral defeat than the one Romney appears to be facing.

Talking about “the interests of white” makes about as much sense as equating heterosexual sex and homosexual sex as similarly situated.

“White people” is the most artificial, polyglot, infinitely flexible, sociological concept that has ever been perpetrated upon mankind. I for instance, have no interests in common with M_Young, although he is an intelligent and capable opponent to spar with.

Romney himself played the “Jeremiah Wright Card” on a Feb 2012 Hannity Show

ABC Report: May 17, 2012

Mitt Romney Defends His Wright Quote: ‘I Stand by What I Said, Whatever It Was’

“After a leaked “super PAC” proposal to make ads about President Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Romney tried to distance himself from the document, saying it was the “wrong course.”

But a reporter noted that in February, Romney brought up Wright unprompted in an interview with the conservative media personality Sean Hannity – a clip that Democrats unearthed early in the day.

In the clip, after Hannity played a sound bite of Obama saying, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation,” Romney said he believed Obama didn’t understand “that Judeo Christian philosophy is an integral part of our foundation.”

“I’m not sure which is worse: him listening to Rev. Wright or him saying we must be a less-Christian nation,” Romney said.

Romney’s explanation today fit right into a frame opponents have tried to put around him – that he doesn’t know what he supports and what he opposes.”

>When the Jeremiah Wright thing first broke in 2008, I spent a few hours watching the full text of his speeches on YouTube. I didn’t find anything I particularly objected to, or couldn’t readily defend.

While I didn’t do all the research you did, I agree, although I wasn’t aware of the racist overtones that Bob S. detected in his thinking. I caught echoes of William Stringfellow’s warnings against making idols of images, ideologies, and institutions– all of which flourish in the corridors of power in Washington D.C., the modern world’s palace of Babylon. If Wright’s preaching has inoculated Obama against some of these fatal temptations (most notably the clouded judgment from a belief in “American exceptionism”, which has occasioned so much rashness abroad) we ought to breathe a sigh of relief.

“But if he loses, there will no doubt be a segment of the right that will gnash its teeth for the next four years over the fact that Obama was elected — twice! — without having been fully vetted.”

That segment of the right will be convinced of Obama’s (or any Democratic President’s) lack of legitimacy regardless of facts. Be it the silliness of birtherism or speculations that Obama was fathered by a Communist, they will find a way.

Fanatics often believe that their ideology is not only true but also obviously self-evident, and that therefore any denial of it is based in conspiracy or outright evil. The inability to accept that others actually think differently, that they are not obligated to use our own worldview, is a great curse upon the reasoning powers of mankind.